250Km in the Desert Taught me This – and I So Did a Conference in Zurich
Beatrice Lessi
“You have run 250 km in the Sahara. You must be so tough!” People tell me this all the time, and every time I smile and think: if toughness were the answer, I would have quit on day two.
Pure toughness breaks you. What actually gets you through 250 kilometres of desert — or through anything hard, really — is something quieter and more flexible: the ability to adapt, to change pace, to act before you feel fully ready.
Resilience is not a wall you build. It is water — it finds a way around.
I got to talk about this, and much more, at TheNewNow Summit at HeadsQuarter Zürich, where I was invited to speak by its founder Evelyn Gorgos (thank you!!). The Health and Wellbeing section was my natural home, but I also made sure to catch as many other presentations as I could — finance, journalism, marketing, hospitality. The room was full of people with something real to say.
And I’ll be honest: I didn’t agree with everybody. There were a couple of presentations where someone my age — you know, the generation that grew up without internet and now has Opinions About AI — was talking about technology with such confident authority that I started to wonder if it made any sense. Name-dropping algorithms is not the same as having something useful to say. The good news is that even the talks that made me quietly skeptical kept me glued to my seat. Disagreement, it turns out, is also sparking great conversations.
TheNewNow Summit is exactly the kind of event Zürich does well: tight, curated, cross-disciplinary, with enough friction to keep your brain alive. Different worlds in the same room, which is where the best conversations always happen — usually in the corridor, usually by accident.
Next time I am staying for the after party!
And in case you are wondering what is written on my tank top, it is: “I know I run like a girl…try to keep up!”
A huge thank you to Yvonne of Funky Forty and Stephan Gubler for the photos and for the support — you make everything more fun.
